Impressed by Fairfield Police Crisis Intervention Team

Published 3:46 pm, Wednesday, February 20, 2013

As a member of the medical staff at Fairfield Counseling Services, it is my job to evaluate psychiatrically challenged individuals and prescribe treatments aimed at alleviating their symptoms and improving their quality of life. I am called upon to do this in the least personally restrictive approach to preserve as much of their autonomy and dignity as I am able. I balance this with my duties as a member of the larger team of mental health professionals attempting to keep communities safe. This is not an easy feat, particularly working within a mental health system that is broken and "dysfunctional," to coin one of our professions' own pejoratives.

I have been providing this care since 1992 and have deemed many individuals over the years too compromised to remain safely in their community-based settings. Often, I have needed to call upon law enforcement for skilled assistance when I have had a potentially dangerous patient present to me for psychiatric exam.

I was pulled into one such psychiatric emergency recently with a patient unknown to me but clearly suffering in a vulnerable cognitive state. I quickly assessed that this patient needed careful transport to the hospital. After calling 911, I made it my priority to manage the two most pressing unknowns: ensuring the safety of staff and other patients present in the clinic given how violent this patient could become, and managing the potential for increased agitation prompted by the presenting police officer/EMS personnel. You see, with all the expert training offered to police officers and EMS, how to manage a psychiatric crisis is often lost, as is commonly exhibited when these folks arrive to a certainly unpredictable psychiatric situation such as this.

I was incredibly impressed with the clinical savvy, expert interviewing skills, and the willingness to participate in our team that Officer Newkirchen, Fairfield Police Department's CIT program officer, brought to the psychiatric situation at our clinic. The dignity and respect he afforded this patient exhibited great compassion and a refreshing educational understanding of mental illness by law enforcement. He kept calm in a situation that could have easily become re-enflamed by uniformed, imposing first responders. The CIT program, at least as this officer has exhibited, is clearly a great asset to your police force. Everyone in the community can feel safer knowing this service is available when psychiatric crises emerge in our most vulnerable community based settings -- schools, mental health clinics and residential facilities, to name a few.